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Along with just about everything else, Web 2.0 has changed the way people attend professional conferences. There’s no waiting for a newsletter or the AALL Spectrum to read program reviews. Heck, you don’t even have to wait an hour or so for a blog post about it like you did in the dark ages of 2004! You can log onto Twitter and see what’s happening in the room across the hall or commiserate with a fellow attendee about that annoying person in the back of the hall that didn’t get the memo to TURN OFF YOUR DAMN CELL PHONE WHEN YOU ARE ATTENDING A PRESENTATION! WERE YOU BORN IN A BARN OR SOMETHING? Sorry. That is a MAJOR pet peeve of mine.

Also, in these days of high travel costs and low professional development budgets, one can almost vicariously attend a conference from the comfort of one’s own office. Almost. Personally, I’d rather scrimp and eat peanut butter for month if it means I got to get on a plane and fly somewhere, but I know that there are people out there for whom airport layovers are not a fun adventure or otherwise have reasons that travel is not an available option.

Blogging – Most conferences now have an “official blog”. SLA used its existing blog to cover conference materials. AALL 2008 has the Daily Rose, that anyone can register to post on. I also like to run Google blog searches when I know there’s a big conference (like SLA or Computers in Libraries) going on. Finding relevant posts can be hit or miss, but since the conferences I’m interested in are attended by librarians, the bloggers are pretty good about tagging posts and using terminology that makes sense. So, for an example, here’s a blog search on “SLA 2008”.

Wikis – Personally, I think wikis have a greater use for conference attendees than a group blog would, since it allows for better organization of material. SLA has a wiki that seems to be aimed at more out of town visitors to Seattle and the ALA’s Annual Meeting Wiki is similar in focus. The best conference wiki I’ve seen, from a “what’s in it for me?” standpoint, is the wiki for Computers in Libraries 2007. I especially like the attendees section (under “community” on the main page.” ) It’s a nice way to pre-network before the conference and is helpful if you’re actively stalking (or trying to avoid) certain members of your profession like I am. (Oh, don’t you judge me. You know you do it too.) ALA’s wiki has a similar section, but no one is using it, and as we’ve discovered with Web 2.0, it has to be used by a threshold number of people to be valuable.

Twitter – At a conference, Twitter is basically like very public IM. Very public. Which is why I am thinking very hard about whether or not I want Twitter while at AALL because I have a negligible internal censor, a very small profession and about 35 years of career left – not a good combination. It’s good for finding out where someone is, or if there’s a great presentation going on, but since it will be stream of consciousness blogging, it’s long-term value for understanding a presentation is very small. SLA attendees used the tag #SLA2008 to mark their posts about the conference. Somehow (perhaps through Group Tweet, perhaps through hashtags, perhaps through magical gnomes), these posts fed into the SLA2008 Twitter profile that one could add to one’s Twitter Follow list. Another option for this is to use summize and set up a search for that tag.

Photos – Oh, Lord, this is another Web 2.0 option that’s a gonna get people in trouble. It’s bad enough that there’s photographic evidence of Librarians Going Wild that appear in publications like AALL Spectrum. Now, thanks to services like Flickr, people are going to have to walk into an early morning round table not knowing if shots of them making a damn fool of themselves at the West Party the night before have been posted to the Internet. For some possible examples of this, check out Flickr pictures tagged with SLA 2007.

YouTube – Again, another application that may be educationally useful (e.g. there appears to be at least one slide presentation from SLA on here) , but will more likely be used to capture the “social” aspects of conference attendance….allow me to present “SLA Librarians Gone Wild.” Safe for work, possibly not safe for life, especially if the thought of a bunch of middle aged librarians rocking out to the Village People frightens you. Just remember, some things, once seen, cannot be unseen.

Social Networking – During the conference, I can’t see that Facebook would be much use in meeting people, but it’s a nice pre-conference/post-conference networking tool. Here’s the event page for AALL 2008. (Must be logged in to Facebook to view.) There’s the option of posting useful pages

Slides – You could shell out money to the conference to get the package of presenter materials. But that wastes trees and costs money. Some presenters are starting to put their material up on sites such as the obviously named SlideShare. There aren’t many up yet, but you can see some SLA 2008 presentations. (Note: may have to re-click search button.)

Some general notes…

With all of these, once you find the “sweet spot” of term searching, you can have the results set to the RSS feed reader of your choice. It also helps if before the conference starts, someone steps up and declares what the “official tag” will be. I’m currently following the CALI conference, and there’s been some problem using cali2008 as a tag on Flickr since people also use that for Californian vacations.

Great post. I think you’ve covered most everything except Meebo, which is another back channel conversation location. At SXSW, the conference organizers set up Meebo rooms for each session. Sometimes they were useful and interesting, but others it was more “helloooo, anyone here?”

I love your reasons for not Twittering at AALL. 🙂 I doubt I’ll be Twittering much myself because (a) no free wi-fi (or so I assume) and (b) I’m presenting a few times, so the “do unto others thing” is a pretty strong motivator. 🙂

Oh, and Flickr groups. I don’t know if there’s one for AALL2008 yet, but there were for AALL2007 and AALL2006.

@ Lyo – Thanks! Maybe I’ll see if I can adapt it post-conference for someone.

@ Jason – Thanks, to you too! I had money on magical gnomes, but it’s nice to know that it is possible for a human to do it as well. Hopefully someone (or me) will set something similar up for AALL as I’m not thrilled with the summarize.com option.